Thomas the Tank Engine is not facing decommission for being a boy train, despite reports in the Herald Sun and by some members of the Victorian Liberal party.
Photograph: UNIVERSAL

Thomas the Tank Engine is not facing decommission for being a boy train. No Victorian council library is planning to remove any children’s books from the shelves because of feminism. And an academic report suggesting that the development of limiting gender roles and damaging stereotypes are engendered in children from the age of three isn’t saying you can’t even call a girl a girl anymore.

No, Winnie the Pooh will not be “banned for not meeting gender tests”, as the Herald Sun reported and the shadow minister for families and children, Georgie Crozier, repeated, and shadow education minister, Tim Smith, bellowed after her. There isn’t even going to be a “gender test” – this is all nonsense beyond fantasy.

Ah, but the Victorian Liberal party have never met a social issue they couldn’t chase down an alleyway to beat up. Their knuckles barely dry from last month’s bruising campaign for gay conversion therapy, they’re now giving this innocent ANU report a thorough walloping. I imagine the report in the cowering form of a pre-serum Captain America, insisting “but ... facts remain facts!” from a corner, even as Smith stomps on his head. A crowd of goons assemble to watch from tabloid papers, tabloid TV and fools on Facebook, their mouth’s a-lathering as they sniff at blood.

Of course, fighting gender stereotyping is not about banning books. It’s about confronting how a bronze-age cultural insistence that all humanity conform to a mere two categories of pink-or-blue behaviour is not only still with us, but coercive, limiting and damaging our children.

The report speaks to research that we’ve been accumulating for decades. Encouraging girls away from technical and construction-based “boys toys” – or interest in engines and trains – deprives them opportunities to refine useful skills in mathematics, measurement and spatial reasoning. Simultaneously, chastening boys from engaging with dolls, dress-ups and role play denies them improved development of – again, quite useful – emotional, communication and social skills.

These are needless, arbitrary divisions which we impose on children for no reason beyond cultural superstitions that predate the invention of books. Yet we persist with these distinctions – at our cost – because of habit, because of outrage-mongering by opportunistic policymakers and because of bullying dimwits terrified they may yet be obliged by life to consider any numbers larger than two. What’s more, the gendering of toys and play is now worse than it was fifty years ago, with aggressive marketing to match.

Let’s stop indulging other people’s prejudice and ancient propaganda and – here’s a radical idea – prioritise what’s best for the kids. The aim of the original report was to inform how to minimise distinctions on the basis of gender in order to build inclusive educational behaviours in children. That’s a good thing for them, and for the society they’ll be equipped with a greater diversity of skills to create.

Are gendered toys harming childhood development?

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Overcoming the influence of stereotypes is about having conversations around books and other cultural material – including people’s attitudes. It’s to encourage children to think critically and come to evidence-based conclusions about the nature of reality, within a positive moral framework. This process enhances the capacity of children to process knowledge, develop problem-solving skills and mature into adults. Traditionally, we call it “education”.

But education is irrelevant to the, um, Liberal education spokesperson in Victoria, who manages to demand in his press release that someone “step in and stop this ideological rubbish in our classrooms” in the very same paragraph he pledges to a curriculum review headed by his ideological comrade, Jennifer Buckingham. She’s presently employed by the conservative think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies. What a coincidence she was quoted alongside ... Tim Smith, of all people, in an Australian piece earlier this month, critical of David Gonski’s education review that encourages “collaboration and creativity” in children.

They’re all right to be very afeard. You can see the dangerous consequences to which it leads, that kind of expansive thinking. Encouraging children to work together, use their imaginations, accommodate differences, fulfil their potential as independent thinkers and critically deconstruct the messages offered them will not prove terminal for Thomas the Tank Engine, or society. Yet how it must desperately threaten the conservatives, and their strategy of hollering out baloney when the facts fail to suit them.